Why successful businesses must imagine and create to cope with change

A recognised central trait of great leaders is their ability to imagine and create new frontiers, new beginnings. We call this vision, focus, resourcefulness or thought leadership. We know it when we see it in their ability to not only adapt quickly, but also to thrive no matter the changing circumstances they come up against. It is no different for successful businesses.

They must imagine and create to cope with change. Imagine and create to differentiate. Then, imagine and create some more, to stay ahead of the pack. Yet, enterprises are not necessarily wired to really imagine and create. That's because breakthrough innovation is hard to quantify to the last decimal, as explicitly measurable return on investment at the inception of the process.

It is hard to say, 'Let's sit in a room, brainstorm and just come up with a blockbuster, guaranteed to bring in X million dollars in revenue'. Everybody agrees we can't do that. Yet, most enterprises continue to derisk the creative process by only backing projects that have a measurable return in sight first off. Take, for example, how it is usual for organisations to spend 70-80% of their IT budgets — one of the strongest expediters of innovation — on simply keeping "lights on", when they could be creating a cutting business edge by harnessing technology to power new ideas that spark growth.

Yet, when you consider the pressure on resources, as well as the costs and risks of innovation, this behaviour is not hard to understand. But the truth remains that if the enterprise's only criterion for putting its technology might behind innovation is the guarantee of a measurably successful end product or service, then innovation is bound to take a back seat. And, there is little organisations could have done. Until now.

An unprecedented answer has emerged in the form of the best-in-class business platform. This is a significant enhancement of the first generation business platform, which as the ultimate efficiency-enabler, has helped organisations become more agile, achieve global reach, spend their IT dollars more intelligently, and of late, persuaded many to switch to standardised processes delivered as managed services.

The best-in-class platform enables not just efficiencies and best-practice processes, but actually breaks new ground by powering innovation-led alternate futures for the enterprise, so businesses can leverage any of the several valuable options it offers to ably respond, adapt and thrive in a dynamic, often unpredictable, business environment. In other words, it envisions and seeds multiple paths of possible enterprise evolution, without making any demands on enterprise resources, all the while laying a solid foundation for an immensely simpler and faster process of "creation".

And, because its foundation is the same as that of a first-generation business platform — cloud computing, along with software as a service and business process outsourcing (BPO) — it brings with it all the traditional benefits of agility, cost-effectiveness and scale. The velocity of innovation is accelerated, it costs less to create, resources can be ramped up and down at will and most importantly, innovation, engineered in this manner, poses far less risk to the organisation. Suddenly, a failed idea costs the enterprise significantly less than one would have imagined.

And, this may well set the stage for those "dead and buried" ideas to finally re-emerge from the woodwork of the organisation. With risks mitigated, enterprises start dreaming of innovations that can create unimagined possibilities. The best-in-class platform feeds this fire with ready-to-leverage innovation blueprints that can deliver measurable business outcomes.

For instance, it adds value to vanilla HR process automation and management, with a fully managed portal to improve employee engagement or perhaps a serviced forum to facilitate the exchange of ideas or even retain, within the enterprise, knowledge that threatens to leave along with its ageing workforce. And, should the organisation need something above and beyond what's encrypted in the blueprints, the platform partner co-creates what is missing, in dialogue with the business. The ideas don't stop there.

Some of these innovation blueprints are so compelling as to be able to create new business models. Take the example of a "mobile-bank", powered by a cloud-based core platform, for financial inclusion. This enables a bank to penetrate remote markets without an expensive physical branch network, enter new service segments and even, perhaps, test the waters in greenfield territories quickly, cost effectively and at low risk.